Try a new game: Make others smile — and let yourself smile with them

I’m not sure exactly when this game started. I don’t even remember when I first noticed what I was doing. I just know it frequently lifts my spirits when I need a boost.

It sounds silly. It sounds like something a child might do. But it makes me happy — and I’ve realized it lets me bring a brief bit of joy to others along my way every day. And it’s super simple.

The game? I count how many times each day that I can get people to smile — when they clearly hadn’t felt like smiling beforehand.

Ridiculous? Maybe. Childlike? Absolutely. Life-changing? Maybe.

Dr. Jerome Motto was involved with attempts to curb suicide in the San Francisco Bay Area for years. One of his patients committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1963, but the retired physician told the New Yorker in 2003 that the suicide which affected him the most occurred in the 1970s. After a man jumped to his death, Motto learned something that left him chilled.

“I went to this guy’s apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner,” he said. “The guy was in his 30s, lived alone. Pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’”

Apparently, nobody smiled at him. He jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and died.

What if you could have been the person who smiled at him? What if you could have made him smile? Might you have saved his life?

We never know the drama that’s going on inside the heads of the people around us. We never know who’s miserable and needs a reason to smile, even if it’s just for a moment.

Today, I got three smiles from people who didn’t seem inclined to smile before I said something to them. Just three people. It took me only a few seconds of effort. But all three seemed briefly happy — and each experience gave me a brief feeling of euphoria

In Walmart this evening, I stopped to chat with the door greeter. She was having a terrible day and she told me how unhappy she was with a couple of things. I briefly commiserated with her and then I told her — almost as an afterthought — that she looks really great tonight wearing some red earrings that matched a bright red shirt underneath her Walmart vest.

She immediately brightened and a big smile came over her face.

“Thank you so much,” she said. “I really needed that.”

She hugged me and I went on my way, but she was still grinning.

There are a million ways to make people smile. Sometimes it’s a compliment — if it’s truly genuine, of course. Other times, it’s sincerely listening to what they have to say. At other times it can be a silly joke. After awhile, it becomes a game.

I made a 3-year-old girl smile in Chick-fil-A tonight. She certainly wasn’t a suicide risk, but you might have thought her life was over as her mother led her to the restroom at one point. She was limping and her exasperated mom tried to get her to move along.

When they came out of the restroom, I smiled at the mother and she said, “She’s decided she can’t tee-tee because she has a broken leg.” And they went back to their table near the play area, but the little girl was still unhappy.

I was leaving a couple of minutes later, so I stopped at their table and asked the little girl if her broken leg had healed. She grinned a huge smile and started showing me where her leg had been “broken” a few minutes before. I told her she must heal really quickly and congratulated her on being better. Her mother seemed to appreciate someone taking the little girl seriously and she grinned at our exchange.

There was another woman in a different store, but you get the idea. In each case, the exchange took only a few seconds, but it made someone else happy — and it made me feel happier, too.

Try my game. I suspect you’ll enjoy it.

How many grumpy people can you get smiles from? You won’t always be successful. Some people seem to enjoy their misery so much — or else they’re just so deep in pain — that they won’t play along. But that’s OK. Just count how many times you get the unexpected smile. You might be surprised.

Sunsets make me happy. They make me smile. The more dramatic ones frequently cause others to smile, too. So here’s my blatant attempt to make you smile. Will it work?

I shot the picture above about five minutes after sunset tonight in Birmingham. It was gorgeous to experience and it has been a joy to share. Take a close look at it. See if the beauty I experienced will make you smile, too.

I sized a copy of this sunset picture for use as a desktop picture on a computer, so if you’d like to grab a copy of this — if it will make you smile — click here to download a 2560×1600-pixel version. It’s sized for the native resolution of a 13-inch MacBook Pro, but it should be able to resize for most screens.

And here’s Merlin guarding the windows of my office Thursday morning. My cats and my dog make me smile — and it makes me happy to share them with others. (They have their own Instagram account if you’d like to see more.)

There are plenty of reasons to smile. Beauty. Humor. Love. Good will. Gratitude. You can find plenty of reasons if you look for them.

Making others smile might not change your life. You might not even save anybody else’s life. But if you’ll make a few people smile today, you’ll make them just a little bit happier — and you might find it changing you just a little bit every day.

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What if your daughter were about to start kindergarten and you went to the affluent school where she was about to go and discovered that the school was teaching nonsense? That’s exactly what happened to an education consultant in Colorado who recently visited his daughter’s new school. Everybody was nice, but when the kindergarten teacher talked about their methods of teaching reading, he cringed. She was using “progressive” methods that were debunked decades ago. He’s learning that most schools use similar techniques that don’t work, simply because schools of education are committed to ideas and techniques based on ideology instead of cognitive science. So why do so many people entrust their children’s future to these well-meaning but incompetent people? It’s one of the most underreported scandals of modern learning. Read his summary of what he’s found here and then check out the radio documentary to which he refers where you can find out more.

I really enjoy political satire. You might remember that my first short film was political satire. But there’s a trend in political satire today which I find disturbing — and this graphic is a great example. This fake promotional ad for Fox News was placed on New York City subways recently. When I found it on social media, people who lean to the political left were smirking and enjoying this attack on their “stupid” opponents. But this isn’t satire. It’s just a mean-spirited attempt to say, “Those who agree with me are smarter than you idiots who watch Fox News.” It’s a smirking, nasty attack which makes no point other than to claim superiority over people for the sin of disagreeing. I absolutely loathe Fox News, but I also loathe CNN and MSNBC and all the other media outfits who pander to partisans and intentionally try to divide people. If you want to show that you’re a small-minded bigot who doesn’t understand his opponents, just pretend your enemies are all stupid and evil. They’re not. The truth is a lot more complicated. Ideas are ripe for satire, but that involves creative thinking, not just nasty personal attacks.

When I have a bad day, my first reaction is to want to turn to someone I love. But my next instinct is a paradox. If I can’t call someone and I can’t touch someone and I can’t be with someone who loves me, I have an overwhelming desire to be alone. Tuesday was an unpleasant day. I had to argue with my bank about something. (I won, but still.) Something happened at work that made me want to walk out and never return, although I understand that nobody else involved would understand. Tonight, someone on Facebook who I barely knew reacted badly to something I said — for reasons I’m completely baffled about — and called me a “jackass” and unfriended me. I’d like to talk with someone I love. I’d like to spend time with a loved one and feel safe and understood. But since I can’t do that, I crave the opposite. I want to find a cabin somewhere and disappear for a month. We humans are social creatures. We need each other. But there are days when others cause enough hurt that a few weeks of silence would be a relief. This has been one of those days.

Democracy is going to die — and it’s all because the human brain prefers easy answers to complex problems. You and I were born during the golden age of democracy. It was a period during which it was assumed that democracy was the natural evolution of civic governance. But Dr. Shawn W. Rosenberg is challenging that idea. He’s a leader in the study of political psychology and he says research convinces him that the human brain isn’t wired for self-rule and that democracy is heading toward collapse. In a paper presented this year to the International Society of Political Psychologists, Rosenberg argues that the human brain naturally favors simple answers to complex problems, which tends to favor the rise of authoritarian strongmen who offer confident and simplistic solutions. Anyone who’s paying attention sees this happening around the world already. Donald Trump isn’t the cause of the problem, but he is an early example of this outcome in action. All authoritarian rulers come to power offering simplistic solutions — just as Adolph Hitler did in Germany and Benito Mussolini did in Italy. I’ve argued for 20 years that this country is heading toward social and economic collapse and I’ve made the case that things are going to get ugly when that happens, at least for those who are not prepared. Many people will ignore this evidence, of course, because they have too much emotionally invested in the idea that democracy will prevail — but that is just another example of clinging to a simple answer to a very complex problem. Don’t be surprised when things get ugly.

Political candidates are liars. They can’t help it, because lying to voters is the only thing that gets them elected. They have to promise things which are not possible. I used to write political promises for my clients, so I know this very well. None of my successful clients ever did anything which I promised for them. Every day lately, I see new promises from presidential candidates. I know they’re lying about what they will do if elected — and I assume they know they’re lying, too. When a society changes, the change starts from culture — and that starts with the values which individuals hold. I hate many things about this society. I want a lot of changes. When I was young, I believed the way to change those things was by becoming a political leader. I know better today. We live like hamsters on a wheel or rats in a maze. Government can’t change that. Only we can make those changes for ourselves. The next time you hear a politician promising to change your life — your work life or your home life or your children’s future — remember that the person is lying. Don’t wait for politicians. Take the initiative and change your own life. Nobody else can do it for you.

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